Remember back in June, when Comcast began lighting up a network of public Wi-Fi hotspots generated by its residential customers’ Xfinity modems without first asking their permission? Some customers had concerns about privacy and bandwidth issues, and now there’s been a class action lawsuit filed in a San Francisco federal court over Comcast’s practice. From […] …

Back in April, AT&T said that Houston was one of 100 cities where it was considering launching its GigaPower Network, a Gigabit Ethernet service that would offer ultra-fast Internet, voice phone and cable TV.

Today, the company is announcing that GigaPower will indeed be available in the Houston area – though it’s not yet saying when, or exactly where.

Comcast appears to be in the process of doubling its connection speeds in Houston, with some customers seeing their 50 megabit-per-second downloads jump to more than 100 Mbps. Comcast last doubled speeds for some Houston customers in March 2013, taking 25 Mbps Internet subscribers up to 50 Mbps. At that time, the company didn’t charge […] …

Back when AT&T, Verizon and other major wireless carriers quit offering unlimited data accounts to new customers and began urging current customers to move to shared plans, there was much anguish and gnashing of teeth. But based on a new study from the Government Accounting Office, the spirit of wireless customers has been broken – they’ve accepted data limits.

Ryan Block, who works at AOL and at one time was Engadget’s editor-in-chief and is co-founder of gdgt, was moving and decided he wanted to cancel his Comcast service and start at his new home with a different provider. Simple, right? Just pick up the phone, call Comcast and disconnect. Well, no. It wasn’t that […] …

Comcast has turned on the Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspots in Houston that I wrote about in today’s Houston Chronicle. Approximately 50,000 of the residential Arris Touchstone Telephony Wireless Gateway Modems in the area are now broadcasting an “xfinitywifi” hotspot that’s free for any Comcast customer to use. Comcast spokesman Michael Bybee said the process was completed […] …

Update: Comcast has turned on the first 50,000 residential hotspots. Original post: Some time on Tuesday afternoon, about 50,000 Comcast Internet customers in Houston will become part of a massive public Wi-Fi hotspot network, a number that will swell to 150,000 by the end of June. Comcast will begin activating a feature in its Arris […] …

You may have gotten excited on Monday when you saw AT&T’s announcement that it was considering bringing gigabit Internet service to 100 cities, with Houston being on the list. So far, the only city that actually has AT&T’s GigaPower service is Austin, and there the service is “only” operating at 300 Mbps speeds, with […] …

Loading...

More

Dwight Silverman's TechBlog Search

Keyword search across all the entries in this blog.

Videos

_

Browse previous blog posts by month and year of entry. You'll see all the posts for that time period.

Select Month

Show Earlier

Browse previous blog posts by month and year of entry. You'll see all the posts for that time period.